


Silken Children

by lanie_q_westwood



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Deviates From Canon, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Manipulation, Mythical Beings & Creatures, NaNoWriMo, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, Post-Hogwarts, Romance, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-28 19:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10837578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanie_q_westwood/pseuds/lanie_q_westwood
Summary: Post-Hogwarts, post-Hermione, Ron & Luna navigate their new relationship while trying to overcome their own insecurities, interference from friends & family, Luna's possible tragic destiny, and danger in the form of a powerful dark witch and her boy toy.





	1. Chapter 1

“Their tinier, lighter bodies float through the air. Mine is heavy on land, but in the water it is buoyant. I do the jellyfish float in the water, and when I lift my head to breathe, I see them hovering over the cattails like dragonflies. They don’t have wings, but they do little spins and flips in the air from time to time. I don’t know if they can see me, too. I almost hope not. In comparison to them, I am a lumbering ridiculous creature. All I do is float and nibble on seaweed and watched the pictures in my head . Lift my head to breath.”

Luna pauses and sighs. Ron waits a minute to see if she’ll continue; gets lost in how the fine silver hairs on her arm shimmer in the sunlight.

“Is that it?” he asks quietly.

Luna turns and half-smiles at him. “Hmm?” she asks after a second.

“I didn’t know if you were done or just thinking of what came next.” he said.

“Oh.” She turns back towards at the pond and sighs. “No, that’s all I remember.”

“You remember? Of what? Nibbling seaweed? That can’t be you?” Or could it? Ron wondered. Hard to say sometimes with Luna.

“No, it’s not my memory. Not originally. I tapped into it, but I couldn’t capture or retain all of it. Murplefloats have very dense complicated memories. Sometimes it’s tricky to separate their real memories from their daydreams. And some of their daydreams are the memories of other creatures. They’re very sensitive. They spend a lot of time floating in silence and ruminating. They leave their minds open and all sorts of things come into them. And then they react to the images they pick up, creating their own new images and memories. They can tell the difference; there’s a subtle fingerprint on the thoughts that they can detect from inside their own brains. But for an outsider, the differences can be difficult to detect. Or impossible.”

Ron stared at her for a long moment after finishing, his aqua eyes staring at her large silver ones. She reached up a hand and ran it through the thick red hair lying across his forehead, smoothing it to the side and tucking it behind his ear. He flushed and sheepishly pushed it onto his face again. Luna calmly reached up and tucked it behind his ear again. He shook his head and let it fall back in place. She reached for his hair again but he gently grabbed her hand and held it.

“We could go back and forth like this all afternoon,” he smirked at her. Raised her fingertips to his full lips and pressed them there.  
Luna half-smiled back at him, bit her lips and gently focused on slipping the tips of her fingers into his mouth.

“We’ve got all the time in the world,” she says. “No such thing as wasting time.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Ronald, it seemed an eternity before you noticed me the way I wanted you to. Everything else is just coasting for a real eternity and that period is a blip in comparison.”

“How can you be sure?”

“These,” said Luna, slipping on a pair of Spectrespecs from her pocket. The brilliant multi-colored frames and their lenses that magnified her already huge peepers gave her the appearance of a psychedelic owl and Ron couldn’t help but laugh. He gently took the glasses off of her and held them folded in his hand.

“Ok, ok,” he said. “Enough heaviness. Fancy a chocolate frog?” he pulled one from his pocket.

“You know I can’t say no to chocolate, Ronald. Just like I can’t say no to you. So the combination of chocolate and you offering it?” She grabbed a frog and shoved it in her mouth, chuckling as one of the frog’s legs tried to squirm out of her mouth. Ron stared at the chocolate around her mouth and leaned forward to kiss it off. Luna froze and then melted. She kissed him deeply in return and when he leaned back to smile at her he was startled to see a tear tracing the outside of her nose.

“Hey,” he said, wiping it away with his finger and holding it in the air between them. A small swirling globe on the tip of his finger glistening in the sunset. “What is this?” he asked.

Luna shook her head and gave him a watery smile.

“Sometimes it just is too much for me,” she says. “To have you look at me the way you do, especially compared to the way you used to look at me.”

Ron sighed heavily and looked pained.

“Luna, I’m so sorry. If there’s ever anything I wished I could take back or do over...”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “I don’t blame you for that at all. Who wouldn’t look at me a little oddly? I mean, of course I make perfect sense to myself.” She laughed and Ron did a bit too, but still looked regretful. “But most people never see anything in me besides Loony Lovegood. And those who do really take a long time to do so. But it was after such a short period of time that you looked at me and really saw me. I think that has to be significant.”

“I just wish I could take back all the time wasted with Hermione. I know you believe we have all the time in the world, but every minute lost feels like a year to me.”

“It’s only natural that you two would be drawn together. You went through so many intense experiences together. And she is quite the extraordinary witch.”

“Practically a muggle when compared to you.”

Luna’s pearly skin flashed a pale iridescent pink, the closest thing to a blush he had ever seen on her.

“I think it’s time for you to meet Dad,” she whispered, giving him a sly grin, catching Ron unawares. Ron’s mouth dropped open and his eyes widened on cue and he flushed to the tips of his ears. Unlike Luna, Ron’s blushing was not so subtle. He stared at her for a moment and swallowed.

“You really want your father to meet me?” he said quietly, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

“Of course,” said Luna. “I know he’ll like you. You come from a large impressive family and you’ve followed quite handsomely in their footsteps.”

Ron wasn’t sure if this was a backhanded compliment and if he should be insulted. He suddenly felt very sleepy and a tiny bit confused.

“Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, Luna,” he said slowly. “Don’t you like me at all, even a little bit?”

Luna looked taken aback. “Of course I do, Ronald. I should’ve thought it was obvious. But truly dear, sometimes there’s just too much talking. We need to do something.”

“Not right now,” he said. “I’m just too tired to even think, let alone move.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Let’s just take a little nap for now, hmm?”

“Of course,” said Luna, patting her lap and gently pulling his head down onto it. His face turned up to the sky, shaded under the tree, she ran her fingers through his gently wavy fringe, pulling it back from his forehead. She took her index fingers and traced along each of his eyebrows to the center of his forehead, down the bridge of his nose, to the center of his top lip, out to the edges and along his full bottom lip to the center, then down to his chin. She spread her fingertips out and caressed slowly along the edge of his jawline to the lobes of his ears and then put a palm on each of his cheeks, pressing them gently together to purse his lips into a light pucker, which she leaned forward and lightly kissed.

She gazed down at him. “I love you, Ronald Weasley,” she said. “And I will have you.” She smiled.

But Ron was already asleep. Which was fine. This wasn’t necessary for the spell to work, for him to hear it.


	2. Chapter 2

How does she find these people? She stomps her feet and sticks out her lower lip and someone will always come by to see if there’s something they can do to help. They’re fooled by the ribbon in her side part, by her brightly colored clothes, by her short girlish skirts and white knee socks. 

_How do they not go running once she opens her wide mouth and bares her gap tooth sneer and lets loose with the nasal whine?_ Luna wonders. Do they feel sorry for her? Charmed by her? 

Anig is rambling on about nothing again, trying to draw Luna’s attention to every thing she does. A dead leaf ripped into pieces and impaled on tiny twigs stuck into the hard dry dirt under the drought-shriveled lawn becomes an apparent work of art. She only started ripping up the leaves as part of a pout when no one was paying attention, no matter how many times she adjusted her large white plastic sunglasses or stretched out her bare legs before her and flipped her large duck-like feet back and forth in front of her.

_Why does she have to talk so much?_ Luna wondered. Why does everyone always have to talk so much? And never listen to anything real. So many amazing mysterious things going on in the world, as reported in passionate articles so many ordinary people sent into the Quibbler, the periodical her father worked so tirelessly on. But apparently not ordinary at all, considering how she never seemed to meet anyone else who believed these things.

Her mind wandered to the ginger-haired boy in the year before her, the one from a family of people just as red-haired as he was. He seems practical for a wizard, she thinks, but still with a slight remnant of boyish wonder. He’s the youngest boy in his family, so she knows he’s either the coddled baby of the family or the one the older ones pick on. But then she remembers his sister Ginny is in her year and that Ginny as the youngest and the only girl must be the one who’s babied and protected, which makes him the one who gets teased. Now that she thinks of it, she recalls seeing his older twin brothers picking on him, his lush lips in a slight pout and an angry yet resigned look on his face. Angry at the way he’s being treated, resigned to knowing that no matter how much he fights it, and fight it he must, it’s going to continue, and nothing he achieves will ever make it stop. She hopes it won’t wear him down, that he’ll be able to see the love behind the teasing, or that the teasers will occasionally show him the love that’s there.

Ron, she thinks. Not a name she’d chose to fall in love with, but an acceptable name nonetheless. Besides, she tells herself, you fall in love with a person, not a name. 

Though she realized in her case it was pointless to fall in love with anyone. She knew how people in general saw her, and she had actually tried not to do or say things that would make people look at her sideways, but she honestly couldn’t help it. Most of the things she did and said made perfect sense to her, and she was often surprised to find how strange they seemed to everyone else. She was smart, she knew that, and she was observant. She constantly consciously and subconsciously scanned her environment for cues and made notes of variables and reactions they received. But she seemed to be doomed. Her categories and parameters weren’t as narrow as those of others, and she repeatedly found herself startled by what startled other people. Which she found odd among wizards and witches.

Anig makes a big show of pulling out a notebook from her gold-sequined purse. “Ow!” she declares. “My purse is so hot, it burned me! God!” she shakes her purse at Luna. Annoyingly pulled from her reverie, Luna gazes blankly at Anig for a long moment before she can register what’s just happened.

“Yeah, it’s really hot out,” she says finally. This doesn’t seem to be quite the reaction Anig was looking for, so Luna adds a smile at the end. Anig stares at her for a moment, her lips twisted in an expression that could either be a smile or a scowl. Hard to tell sometimes with this one.

“I’m going to go get some water,” says Luna, as if this were a satisfactory conclusion to a debate they’d been having. “Get you anything?”

Anig stares at her, flips her hair, and turns to look out to the rest of the park to see if anyone is noticing her. “No,” she says, much to Luna’s relief. \

Her head was itchy. The sun was too much. She was going to need more lotion soon. She gently scraped absentmindedly at her forearm. She had to get this boy out of her head. It was not going to happen. She knew who he was friends with. The most famous young wizard and the cleverest witch in school. They thought she was odd, too. And The Cleverest Witch had even insulted her father’s magazine. Luna had uncharacteristically snapped at her in defense of her father’s work and again in accusing her of being too narrow-minded. She herself didn’t know how much of her reaction was related to the issue at hand, and how much to the jealousy she felt at being excluded from their circle, by how much time Hermione got to spend with Ron and how little she probably appreciated it. How she was never the one trying to think up an excuse to go talk to him. 

So unlike her to feel jealousy. Not that there weren’t things others had that she didn’t, things that weren’t worth having, but she always felt satisfied with her lot. 

Aside from the loss of her mother, of course. 

And perhaps a father who wasn’t quite so consumed by his work. But Luna was proud of her father and the importance of his work. Of course there were those who looked down on it, those who didn’t understand, like Hermione, but this was always to be expected when you were revealing truths that people didn’t want to accept. Sometimes there was only so much people’s minds could accept. Even witches and wizards.

Luna thought about her father in his pressroom in the basement, of her broom, of her bedroom in the large attic and the screened-in balcony, her mother’s sealed workshop. She thought about the peony bushes around the front porch and how she loved to lie in her bed facing west and stare out through the screened porch and watch the sunset. Their house was in the middle of nowhere, so there was nothing breaking up her view of watching the sun until the last corner of it sunk down behind the treeless horizon.

She was quite surprised to look up from her thoughts and realize she was now standing looking out that very porch and that she had walked home and left Anig behind.

Anig was not going to be pleased.

**Author's Note:**

> I enter NaNoWriMo every year, and only twice have I actually "won". The first time I won was several years ago, with this Harry Potter fanfic. Even though it was obvious that Ron and Hermione would become a couple, I never gave up hope that he would end up with Luna, even when it was obviously hopeless. Not only are they my two favorite characters in the series, but I also felt that his relationship with Hermione was doomed to failure, and that Luna would be a better fit for him. Since I felt so strongly about this pairing, it made it easier to complete the challenge that is NaNoWriMo.
> 
> I've let it sit for a while, and would like to rewrite it as its own story, taking it out of JKR's universe and into my own. So, I've decided to post it here and hopefully get some feedback, both regarding how it works as an HP fanfic and how it might work as an original work. Or anything else anyone might care to share. I'd just be happy enough if anyone took the time to read it at all with all of the other stuff that is out there and everything else people have going on in their busy lives.
> 
> The story does get a great deal darker later, so I will probably update tags as I continue to post chapters.


End file.
